Tom Friedman has moved beyond self-parody into something… weirder and more clinical:

… DiNunzio is one in a wave of entrepreneurs who’ve been buoying our economy from below, at a time when so much national economic policy has been paralyzed. These risk-takers never got the word that China will eat our lunch or Germany will eat our breakfast, so they just go out and start stuff, and build stuff, and invent stuff — and create 20 jobs here and 30 jobs there. Specifically, DiNunzio is part of a budding new economic activity called the “sharing economy” or “collaborative economy,” which offers a new avenue for the middle class to create wealth and savings. These entrepreneurs are not the only answer for our economic woes — they create jobs, destroy jobs and create big efficiency savings all at once — but they are surely part of the answer, and it’s a shame that we don’t spend more time thinking about how to multiply them.

Like all good entrepreneurs, DiNunzio, 35, got her start by paying attention. In her case, it was paying attention to her rapid-fire wedding and then divorce to start a company in 2009, called Recycled Bride, which enabled couples to, as Forbes put it, sell “their wedding finery and excess sundries so they could ride off in the sunset without staggering under the weight of debt.” She expanded that into Tradesy, which enables women to monetize the used or unused clothing and accessories in their closets by creating a peer-to-peer marketplace in which pricing, listing, buying, selling, shipping and returning goods is seamlessly easy — and with Tradesy taking a 9 percent commission. She is not alone in that space, but it’s working.

“We have a section on the site for wedding attire,” she explained. “We have seen three brides wear the same dress.” The first bought a Vera Wang wedding dress for $8,000 and then sold it on Tradesy for $3,000. The second wore it and resold it for $3,000. “So the bride in the middle of that trade wore her $8,000 Vera Wang wedding dress for free.”…

Yeah, finding an opportunity to ‘monetize’ a eight-thousand-dollar dress (for a wedding that didn’t even last!) is the very definition of First World Problems…

Back before washing machines and public laundromats, one of the bottom-entry entrepreneurial task sets was “taking in wash”. Going from door to door, picking up heavy baskets of other peoples’ soiled undergarments and sheets, heating water (over a fire, or on a hand-fed wood- or coal-burning stove), dealing with the caustic chemicals involved, hand-washing endless pounds of wet yardage, wrestling the end results up to hang dry — plus ironing, and mending, before lugging the heavy baskets back to those fortunate enough to outsource all this labor in return for a miserable pittance. It didn’t require much of a fiduciary investment, nor training that any woman wasn’t expected to have acquired before puberty, but it was such a burdensome and unpleasant task-series that any housewife with even a little ‘discretionary’ income would pay to have it taken, literally, off her hands. The unlucky widow or elderly spinster ‘taking in washing’ was such a cultural standby that economists joked about theoretical societies where the medium of exchange was every individual taking in someone else’s laundry. (Fred Pohl wrote an sf story where far-future anthropologists thought that the national legislators of the once-powerful Nacirema survived that way, thus the name of their capital, “Washing Done”. He may not have invented that joke.)

But today “we” — meaning Tom ‘I Married A Billionaire’s Daughter” Friedman and the people who pay him to write this crap — don’t even consider the possibility that labor might have value. What they have — what they value — is tons of expensive, logo’d “inventory”. Worse comes to worse and Tom’s father-in-law cuts him off, Tom is not gonna roll up his french-cuffed monogrammed sleeves; he’s gonna wander around his mansion and dig out some of last season’s Coach bags to sell to the middle-manager Aspirationals who pay his speaker fees.

Via:

Friedman: "Reinventing the consignment shop on the web will save the U.S. economy. Also, PR pitches work with me." http://t.co/9Nq06LLVhs

to start a company in 2009, called Recycled Bride, which enabled couples to, as Forbes put it, sell “their wedding finery and excess sundries so they could ride off in the sunset without staggering under the weight of debt.”

So in a way, DiNunzio’s company profits off of people making the same mistake she did, going for the big circus wedding without any consideration to the actual marriage. I have to wonder how much economic buoying there could possibly be in all of this considering not that many people are in the market for an 8 grand wedding dress to begin with.

Next little Tommy will learn about this amazing new internet enabled business called “car leasing.”

Using the wonders of modern technology teenagers can rent a fancy chauffeured limousine to pick them up at their homes(!), drive them to the high school prom, pick them up after the dance, and take them back home!!!!!

No longer do mom and dad have to purchase a stretch limo and hire a chauffeur for a year, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars!!!!!

Come to think of it, I have noticed quick thinking innovative entrepreneurs in my neighborhood. I’ve seen them for a while reaching into trash cans. But, one day while I was waiting for the limo to take me to Aspen for big talks on new innovative ‘out-of-the-box’ ideas, I struck up a conversation with one of them.

They were fishing out aluminum cans and taking them to recycling centers, and they got money for the used cans. An innovative, sustainable and green industry had arisen right outside my door, and I had never even noticed.

The guy’s name was Ed. He had a crazed gleam in his eye and he talked real fast. An obscure visionary. He said he was working 16/7 so he could save up enough money to afford a dental appointment in a few months, and he asked something about if I could, but the limo was there and I was late…

The business idea is a decent one, but how would it save the economy if we all owned consignment or second-hand shops? No one would be buying anything new!

That’s why the business idea is shit. It’s parasitic. Everything in America is about flipping stuff — flipping used wedding dresses, re-selling insurance, repackaging liar mortgage loans, flipping condos… Nobody manufacturing anything. Nobody’s making stuff. It’s all just a frenzy of maggots writing around on a dead whale. That’s not a living economy, it’s a dying Ponzi scheme.

I happened to notice a young Palestinian man working behind the counter. When I ordered my coffee, he realized that I was American. “Ah, like Thomas Friedman,” he said. “Friedman, the great New York Times columnist who understands the needs of and challenges facing people like me, working-class Palestinians living in the European Union, because of how often he travels the world and how many brief but illuminating conversations he has with service industry employees. We are all grateful to be material for his columns and books,” he said, standing in for all people like him, by which I mean most foreign brown people.

This reminds me of Six Months Tommy’s orgiastic response when he found out some American was making T-shirts that said “My job got outsourced to India and all I got was this lousy shirt”. Here is the entrepreneurial magic-of-the-marketplace answer that PROVED offshoring of the tech industry wasn’t bad at all — laid-off programmers could make new careers selling sardonic shirts! Then some other reporter tracked down the shirt guy and he’d made like $11 from this side business.

Maybe you are a BJ regular, but have exhausted yourself today in venting impotent rage and crazed whining. Or, are you a lurker, who probably wants to comment, but are afraid to enter the rhetorical fight club octagon of death.

Fear not, for a fee, send me what you want to say, and I will search the archives for something just right. And, in order to create wealth, I plan on copyrighting what I find.

You are welcome. I accept gold and platinum small denomination bitcoins in payment.

The part from Keynes about how digging up gold and essentially burying it again so it can “back” currency is the same as digging holes, filling them, and digging them up again, and then how this all relates to Bitcoin — extremely well done. Worth a read.

Anyone who reads Smith on how banking panics were generated in the 18th century will note striking similarities to the last one we had. And will wonder what would have happened we had had Smith as Fed chief rather than Greenspan. Though Smith probably would have been hounded to resign by GOPers and corporate Dems wearing Adam Smith ties.

Rent the Runway was actually fabulous. I was a bit suspicious, but it’s great business with great service. I got to wear a dress to a formal party that I would never be able to afford, and those aren’t the sorts of dresses you get to wear repeatedly. The dress showed up on time, in two sizes, was in perfect condition, came with a prepaid envelope to return it, and fit just like the site said it would. They threw in free dress tape, gave me a coupon for my next rental, and took care of the dry cleaning. All for what I consider to be a very reasonable price. Found my shoes on the clearance rack, earrings were on sale, and the weasels were from Grandma. So I actually think that there is much to be said for the business model of renting some things.

None of this, however, doesn’t make Friedman a clueless ass. That business was not started by someone trying to “monetize her closet”, but instead by some HBS grads with great education and resources at their disposal.

@The Republic of Stupidity:
He is a good part of the way there but that ginormus head is blocking further progress. Much more crap comes out his mouth though someone might think it’s a two way system. Which in his case it might just be.

There are some of us who give older things away, things we don’t need or have replaced, whatever, for free to others. We like the feeling of not filling landfills with still usable stuff and we want to help people who might not be able to buy things they need. I’ve passed on a big bag of yarn to a Harlem recreation program for seniors, kitchen utensils to an City EMT unit (they got a whole NEW kitchen but none of the dishes, plates, pots, etc. that you use in a kitchen), etc.

To be fair, without having crap to sell, I wouldn’t have enough to do some training this year. Plus, where would I get to create such epic product copy? I think I was just punch drunk by the time I wrote that.

I know it’s after the story is cold, but could we have a thread mocking former GOP senate primary candidate Peter Shiff? Or is he still some kind of blogosphere hero for “being the one analyst who called the housing meltdown.”

@JoyfulA: When I read the ask from the EMT guy, I was astounded. But as he explained it “the City buying unit doesn’t know what kind of dishware you like or silverware or pots and pans, etc. so they leave that for the EMTs to buy later.” He came to my office to pick up the stuff and was amazed at the bags of stuff I had for him and the unit. He sent me a really nice thank you note.

ETA: I, in turn, have gotten a TV through Freecycle, some good classical CDs, a small pyrex coffee pot, etc. I love the Freecycle idea.

Watched some TV show a few weeks ago about Detroit, and they had a little section on the entrepreneurs in condemned buildings. It seems that when the price of scrap metal spikes, like it did when the Beijing Olympics and Dubai building sprees were sucking up excess, entrepreneurs took Ot upon themselves to unlock the scap in that city’s unused buildings, which is why five years later, it is considered a beacon of hope for rustbelt renewal.

@PurpleGirl: I’ve Freecycled a trampoline, a screen door, a sewing machine, and a weightlifting bench (all left behind by my house’s previous owner), two sets of encyclopedia (mine and a friend’s; it seems people often move into houses with built-in bookcases and need something to fill them), my mother’s deep freeze, my father-in-law’s giant floor-model TV, 10 pairs of jeans from new to worn that I’d outgrown (now I wish I had them back), 100+ used men’s socks (multiple requesters!), two recliners, a dozen men’s shirts (some new), just an endless variety of stuff.

And in return my husband got about eight floor-model radios and many boxes of record albums; I’ve made him stop.

@Redshift: serves me right for taking the afternoon off to sit in traffic looking for ways to thwart the oncoming consignment economy to buy new stuff for people that they probably won’t like even though placed said items on Christmas lists.

Maybe they could do this for movies! You could pay a small fee to view them and then give them back when you’re done!

Every once in a while you get some perceptive libertarian genius who realizes that, since most books just sit on shelves 99% of the time, it would be a really cool idea to create a startup where someone could borrow a book or two for a couple of weeks and bring it back to then be read by someone else. They’d have to think of a name for this kind of place, though.

More of these web-based sharing startups, like the apartment and car sharing services, tend to take existing businesses, weasel around the hotel/rental/livery taxes, remove established protections for when shit goes bad to cut on costs, and slap together an app. Again, you have to think up a weird name for the app, but after that you’re golden.

Every once in a while you get some perceptive libertarian genius who realizes that, since most books just sit on shelves 99% of the time, it would be a really cool idea to create a startup where someone could borrow a book or two for a couple of weeks and bring it back to then be read by someone else. They’d have to think of a name for this kind of place, though.

Much as I hate Stone and Parker, most of their Cunning Plans always send me back to this South Park moment;

“Right now we’re proving we don’t need corperations. We don’t need money. There’s going to be a community were everybody just helps each other.”
“Yeah, there’s going to be like one guy, who like makes bread. And like another guy, that like looks out for other people’s saftey.”
“You mean like a baker and a cop?”
“No, no no. Can’t you guys imagine a place where people, like live together and provide services for each other in exchange for their services?”
“Yeah. It’s called a town.”

@mclaren: Nobody manufacturing anything. Nobody’s making stuff.
This is a pernicious myth. I don’t understand why so many otherwise well informed people seem to believe this. We make more stuff now than we did in 1970 (or 1980 or 1990 or 2000), we just employ far fewer people to do so.

Quite true. But nobody wants to actually say that, because that would give rise to unSerious questions. Like,now that all these people who used to be employed (you know, making stuff) are surplus to the economy, what are they supposed to do? And is the purpose of an economy to meet the needs and wants of the people who comprise it, or to produce ever increasing wealth for a very small number people who don’t need it?

My siblings and I swap books at every family get together. It’s disorganized but getting better. We’re all readers and can judge one another’s tastes so it works out.
At Christmas we’re branching out to used electronics. An LCD monitor for this one, a small TV for the bedroom for that one. A record turntable that I rehabbed for A will go to B now that A is done digitizing his records.

I actually made a living off eBay for a while working differential availability of collectible electronics. The US has lots of vintage tube audio gear, speakers, turntables, etc. from the ’50s and ’60s that’s in high demand in SE Asia. I found, repaired, sold and shipped a lot of heavy old amps to Japan, Korea and China. It was a decent living.

This is one of my many beefs with the conservative and libertarian (but I repeat myself) view of economics; “The Economy” as a theoretical concept has become the ends in itself rather than the means to an ends. And “efficiency” is determined by “whether or not the economy lives up to our theories of how it ought to be.”

So if you have, say, high unemployment, it’s not a sign that there’s anything wrong with The Economy, it’s a sign that people are [too lazy, too unionized, insert-favorite-wingnuttism-here]. And instead of figuring out how to change the economy in order to suit the needs of the public, we’re pelted with many suggestions of how the public needs to change itself in order to suit the needs of The Economy.

I joke about the Market-God from time to time, but it really is the deity of our culture – far more than any version of the Biblical God. It’s the artificial entity that we are all told to bow and sacrifice to in the hopes that maybe if we do it enough, it’ll favor us with success in our life endeavors. And those (most of the time) vain hopes take the place of actually organizing to make our lives better. Opium of the masses, etc.

The People In My Head pronounced this, We have a section on the site for wedding satire.

@pseudonymous in nc: The Harris County Clerk of Courts charged us $50, saved us a bundle we then blew on the parties that followed. That was 28 years ago. I hypothesize there exists an inverse relationship between the cost of the wedding and how long the marriage lasts.

What is precious about Friedman is that he writes this stuff without any sense of irony. It is as if about 20 years ago, upon being made columnist at the Times, they took him through a “de-Irony” machine and he became completely credulous to any millionaire pushing their grift or any Administration pushing a war. Of course now Alex Pareene will have to revive his hack list.

I joke about the Market-God from time to time, but it really is the deity of our culture – far more than any version of the Biblical God. It’s the artificial entity that we are all told to bow and sacrifice to in the hopes that maybe if we do it enough, it’ll favor us with success in our life endeavors.

I agree, and would like to see the reaction when you ask some of these guys in person what the purpose of the economy is. It should have one, and figuring out what we want out of the economy should give us some idea about what our priorities should be and how to change it. However, the question will probably get the same reaction as asking a Christian what the purpose of God is, and get you called some economic version of heretic.

@Suzanne: The Harvard MBAs would explain a lot, in terms of capitalization and connections. There’s so much suspicious and downright disingenuous about her tale, from the way she pretends she just cooked up a l’il website by researchin’ on the Web (a real throwback to the days when professional women used to deprecate their talents) to her claim that “Tradesy has accumulated $97.5 million in inventory, at virtually no cost to our business, in 13 months.”

Seriously, Friedman must not have many women to talk to if he didn’t know consignment shops are a thing. Even here in DC he could head to 14th Street NW and see Current Boutique and Buffalo Exchange a few blocks from each other.

(Imagine that, in a city that attracts huge numbers of twentysomething women to office jobs with mediocre pay where they’re expected to dress three times as nice as any dude in the office, there are thriving consignment shops.)

The US has lots of vintage tube audio gear, speakers, turntables, etc. from the ’50s and ’60s that’s in high demand in SE Asia. I found, repaired, sold and shipped a lot of heavy old amps to Japan, Korea and China.

Speaking as someone who buys old electronics… so it’s YOU making these damn prices go up!
How can a guy get some 1959 JBL D101s if eBay/BJers are sending them around the world?

Back in the 70s, my mom used to buoy our economy from below by caring for the elderly. I can’t wait to tell her she may very well have been one of the progenitors of the entrepreneurial collaborative economy.

What makes Friedman’s POV so outrageous is, as others have pointed out, his attitude towards the value of labor.
Who is the hero in his anecdote? Vera Wang, who designed the dress? The craftsman who stiched it together?

Nope. The hero, the person lionized, is the person who simply persuades others to buy it- the salesman, in other words.

Which, not coincidently, mirrors the Friedman world of capitalism. The corporate CEOs don’t actually DO anything- the CEOs and executives don’t make cars, or light bulbs or computers; they pay others to do that. What the CEO’s job is, his actual set of daily duties, is to manage others, to sell the company, to persuade and cajole and decide.

Not that this isn’t a valuable skill or task- but in the world of the new capitalism, this is the utmost peak of skill, the one deserving of the lion’s share of wealth.

This is why all those airport books that breathlessly tell us how to succeed are all united by a single vision, that of the salesman hawking something. All the tropes and cliches we hear about creative destruction, personal branding, networking, are all variations of the same message- that our goal should be to sell something to somebody.

But this pernicious, on a vastly deeper level than just the annoying glibness- work has always had a special role as the essence of humanity, that the creative work of our hands and minds is what makes meaning in our lives, and gives purpose.
Scorning craftsmanship, ignoring the value of dress designers and seamstresses in favor of dress salesmen tells us that labor is worthless, and belittles those who practice it.